This Website Measures When Men Are Talking Too Much

This Website Measures When Men Are Talking Too Much

We’ve all been in a conversation where we wondered if men were talking too much.

So developer Cathy Deng developed an elegant and simple solution to determine who’s dominating a conversation. Are Men Talking Too Much is a website with two buttons. One is labeled “a dude” and the other “not a dude.” The site measures if a dude or not a dude is talking more, providing a simple percentage at the top. It’s also optimized for mobile, so you can use it on the go.

Deng says that she came up with the idea after a conference experience.

“What really pushed me to build this was attending a tech meet-up that people celebrate as being inclusive, and yet, event after event, I saw men [acting] as the primary participants,” Deng tells PAPER. “Whenever I pointed these types of things out to men (e.g. ‘Did you notice that only men were asking questions?’) they'd react with surprise, because they're just not as attuned to these things.”

The website is intended to highlight real diversity in tech and other contexts.

“I think people are talking a lot about diversity, but it's also very easy to get into a situation where companies are incentivized to *look* like they are addressing diversity with flashy events and initiatives, and then do nothing behind the scenes,” Deng tells PAPER. "I also see some tokenizing going on, where certain individuals and organizations are consistently held up as examples of diversity in tech.”

And Deng wants people to use this simple tool for other purposes than comparing men and women.

“Gender is only one of many flavors of diversity,” Deng writes on GitHub. “Time talking is a simplistic measure of participation. You're welcome to take this code, adapt it, & produce other hacks for inclusion.”